He may have the height but …
Mayor Bill de Blasio missed two-thirds of his shots at a Bronx basketball event with local teens Wednesday—- before promising to do a better job sinking crime in the neighborhood.
“The mayor can make it!” the emcee for the hoops hangout cheered into a microphone at the Belmont Playground at E. 182nd St. and Belmont Ave., as the 6-foot-5 de Blasio tossed three consecutive bricks from near the 3-point line.
Overall he made just five out of 15 shots.
De Blasio was in the Belmont section of The Bronx to participate in a cure violence basketball tournament hosted by an organization called RTG or Release The Grip.
Residents there said his lousy performance on the court was rivaled only by his handling of crime in the city.
Rosanna Gil, 33, a professional translator, who lives across the street from the basketball court with her husband and 4-year-old daughter, didn’t think shooting hoops would do much to solve the rampant crime in her neighborhood.
“Tell the mayor it ‘ain’t going to fix anything! It ‘ain’t gonna work! It’s so bad here,” Gil told The Post.
“I can’t let my 4-year-old daughter come outside, let alone play in the park,” she said, adding that gunshots rang out in the playground three months ago.
Her comments echoed the concerns of four of her neighbors, who declined to be named, but one local father of four said he takes his children to his mom’s in Yonkers or to places in the Hudson Valley to play.
“It’s too dangerous now. These kids aren’t fighting, they’re shooting. It’s gang nonsense,” he said. Gil agreed.
Her comments echoed the concerns of four of her neighbors, who declined to be quoted.
“The guys doing the shooting, the kids, that’s who’s in the park! The city’s fixing up their clubhouse! That’s who hangs in the park, the kids doing all the shooting!” she said of the basketball court.
“Right now, here, it’s really bad. The other day they were breaking into a car right here, these guys, and the cops came, they ran, the cops got out, walked around and left a minute later and they came back and took what they wanted,” Gil said.
“Give the police back their power! They were throwing garbage here on cops, the corner, right here, yesterday. The cops just left! I get it, they want to keep their jobs,” she said.
A third resident, a woman in her 40s, also said that cops sit in their cars instead of enforcing the law because of anti-cop sentiment.
“My whole life, it was never safe but never this dangerous here. This neighborhood just got so dangerous in the last two years,” she said.
“It’s the Black Lives Matter thing,” she continued. “That’s what did it. The cops just sit in their cars, do nothing.”
Asked by a Post reporter about the woman’s concerns, de Blasio promised to address them.
“Well I’ll tell you what we’re going to do, any time we hear about this we make sure the resources get where they are needed, that’s what precision policing is all about,” de Blasio said.
He directed a deputy press secretary and an NYPD official to take a report and check in with the local precinct.
Nearly all categories of major crime in The Bronx have increased compared to the last year. Murders have jumped by 40 percent, grand larceny auto has increased by 54 percent, and robbery is up by 10 percent, according to NYPD statistics through July 18.
